From Sandra

When Alyssa and I started looking at Kashperova’s Sonata for piano and cello in G major, we had no idea what to expect.  It felt like a bit of a curious adventure….to explore a piece written by a woman in the 1890s.  Sadly, when I did my music degree not quite one hundred years after this piece was composed (I graduated in 1992) there was very little said about women composers of the past.  The implication  was that there weren’t really any... other than, say, Clara Schumann and Hildegaard Von Bingen... the only two names I remember being mentioned.  So looking at this piece, I wasn’t really sure what to expect.  Even more sadly, I suspect that I was primed by my education to think there would be something disappointingly “frilly” or “fluffy” or “copycat” about it.  After all, it was written by a “girl.”

We knew it was written in what is considered the “late romantic” time period, so, as the pianist, at first I made assumptions about using the pedal.  Late romantic music is many things, but what came to my mind was Rachmaninoff…. thick, lush textures and a liberal use of the pedal.  So that’s how I approached it.  Running passages, broken chords and arpeggios, washed with pedal to give it that lush feeling.  One thing that immediately jumped out at me was Kashperova’s extensive use of the highest notes on the piano, light, tinkly notes... marked forte!  How else was I going to make that happen?

But then, thankfully, we discovered that there was a small biography of Leokadiya Kashperova, including her own memoirs, available through Cambridge Press.  Upon reading this, I discovered that I had the wrong idea in my head.  Over and over, I read about how she used the pedal sparingly, taught her students to pedal sparingly, even annoyed her most well-known student,  Igor  Stravinsky, by requiring him to play without pedal and use his fingers like an organist.

And so, I started over.  I tried playing with the bare minimum of pedal... using it only where there were held notes that couldn’t be held any other way, or where a slur indicated that notes needed to be connected that couldn’t be connected any other way.

A very different piece began to emerge, and one passage in particular jumped out at me right away. In the last movement, the final series of high register runs and arpeggios in the piano, played without a shimmery pedal effect, became clear, delicate and flute-like, and evoked, for me, the song of a bird, not forte as in loud, but forte as in big hearted and full throttle, announcing a presence not to be ignored.  I was hooked.